Geographic information systems provide for the archiving, retrieving, and manipulating of data that has been stored and indexed according to geographic coordinates of its elements. Geographic information systems and other services can allow a user to request geographic imagery associated with an object or location of interest. For instance, a user may request imagery associated with a particular store, location, landmark, etc. The geographic information system can provide geographic imagery depicting the object or location of interest in response to the request to the user.
Geographic information systems can offer imagery of geographic regions of interest in a variety of different formats and from a variety of different view perspectives. For instance, geographic imagery can be provided as map imagery, satellite imagery, aerial imagery, interactive panoramic imagery presented from a perspective at or near ground level, and other imagery. Certain geographic information systems or services can provide interactive three-dimensional representations of a geographic area. Users can navigate a virtual camera to view the three-dimensional representations from a plurality of different perspectives.
Users of geographic information systems may wish to view information associated with locations or points of interest. Many conventional geographic information systems require a specific query of a location and/or a manual navigation to the location for information associated with the location to be presented to the user. Various mapping services offer “random” location selection techniques that allow a location to be selected randomly and for information associated with the location to be presented to the user. However, such location selection techniques may not take into account potential user interest in a location when selecting the locations, and may select locations that are uninteresting or not noteworthy to a user. For instance, such location selection techniques may select the location based on a random selection of latitude, longitude coordinates. Further, such location selection techniques may unduly limit the potential locations that can be selected.